White supremacy is wrong. Nazis are bad. Slavery was also bad. Equality is good. People of color and Jews belong here, too. We were all created equal.

These ideas, for a vast majority of Americans, are easy concepts to articulate. We teach these values to small children every day, in very simple and unequivocal terms: Hatred is bad. Peace and love are good.

That’s why it has been a perplexing time for many Americans following the horrific events in Virginia this weekend, as we have watched our president and even our own North Carolina lawmakers struggle to articulate these ideas with the vehemence they deserve.

The racists’ march in Charlottesville, Virginia, on Saturday, a protest against the planned removal of a statue of the Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee, presented lawmakers across the country with an easy opportunity to denounce the block of white nationalists, neo-Nazis and the more vast, softer spoken bigots who have celebrated Trump and his party from the day his campaign began.

Only one side planned a march in the name of hatred and racial supremacy, bearing the same symbolic torches that illuminated the vilest moments in Southern history. And only one side plowed into a crowd, taking a life and injuring many more.

Some lawmakers, like Mark Meadows, Thom Tillis and Patrick McHenry, took the low hanging fruit dangling in front of them and did the right thing, renouncing that evil, specifically, in its most glaring form.

Others, including the president and North Carolina's own Sen. Richard Burr, did not.

“As I've told multiple stations in North Carolina yesterday and today,” Burr wrote on his Facebook page Monday, “I'm terribly saddened by Saturday's events in Charlottesville, Virginia. Violence has no place in our society and we must come together as a country to condemn these acts.”

Yes, violence is bad. What a relief that our senator has articulated this kindergarten value. But the vagueness of Burr’s statement leaves so much open to interpretation that his flaccid condemnation wouldn’t even faze those he’s condemning – whomever that is.

And, in fact, it did work for everyone.

The very first comment on Burr’s post reads “Agreed@ Antifa and BLM must be called out for what they are: strong armed foot soldiers for the hate filled democrat party.”

“They initiated the violence, as usual, in charlottesville,” the post reads. “They muster to the calls of violence as sent out by Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Loretta Lynch, Tim Kaine, etc. They must be condemned!”

Therein lies the banal darkness that is weak leadership and vague condemnations in a moment of crisis.

Anyone who wants to believe that people demanding black Americans be treated as equals – that they not be shot in the streets like dogs without ever seeing justice – are at fault for all the world’s evils can continue that belief in perfect comfort. Our oldest scapegoats remain in place, and our most insidious evils cannot only linger, but emerge from the darkness with some perceived approval from a man in a nice suit and no socks in a big, fancy city.

Of course conservatives like Richard Burr should know all too well the importance of language and naming names in times of political turmoil – they wrote the book on it. It wasn’t long ago that Burr’s party couldn’t finish a sentence without screaming at President Barack Obama for refusing to use the phrase “radical Islamic terrorist.”

Words are important, they said. And you can’t defeat the enemy if you refuse to name it.

A joint project by the Investigative Fund at the Nation Institute, a nonprofit media center, and Reveal from the Center for Investigative Reporting found last year that within the past nine years, right-wing extremists plotted or carried out nearly twice as many terrorist attacks as Islamist extremists.

As the chairman of the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, it’s hard to imagine Burr doesn’t have access to the sort of intel one can gather from a Google search. So why, then, would he be so disproportionally unconcerned with white extremists? Why wouldn’t he feel compelled to name names?

It’s an important question, and one without a flattering explanation in sight.

Our leaders’ lack of specificity — and its inherent ambivalence to evils we identified long ago — is not only a failure in leadership, but a dangerous breeze fanning the flames of hatred. And it will never, ever be extinguished as long as we allow even the slightest room for it to burn.

This is the opinion of Casey Blake, opinions editor for the Citizen-Times. Reach her at cblake@citizen-times.com.